"There are now films like THE BEACH which belong to a sort of aristocracy of experimental film - which is just an arbitrary term meaning that a film's plastic aspect is just as important as its meaning or storyline - and Patrick Bokanowski's film has an almost classical quality in this sense, insofar as it is composed like a painting, or, perhaps because of Michèle Bokanowski's contribution, like a piece of music. In THE BEACH, one no longer associates his work with Kafka or Isidore Ducasse, but rather with the light-filled drawings of Victor Hugo or Seurat, Tanguy or even Mir-. It's as if a period of nightmares had come to an end, and a new sense of something like serenity had taken over."
- Dominique Noguez from the preface to the Bokanowski retrospective at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, February/March 1994